A blog about politics, education, Ireland, culture and travel. I am Conor Ryan, Dublin-born former adviser to Tony Blair and David Blunkett on education. Views expressed on this blog are written in a personal capacity.

Tuesday, 23 September 2014

I've written this feature on the Gove legacy for the October edition of Public Finance.

David Cameron's replacement of Michael Gove with Nicky Morgan as education secretary caused consternation among reformers whilst exciting enthusiasm in many staffrooms. Reformers fear his changes will be watered down by his successor; many teachers hope the relentless pressure of change will ease.

But Gove’s legacy may lie less in academies and free schools than in the changes to the curriculum, teaching and accountability. And a focus on classroom teaching by Morgan, with her more conciliatory tone to teachers, could reap real dividends.

Academies are funded directly by the government rather than local authorities, and have had greater freedoms over the curriculum, teachers’ pay and admissions, subject to regulation and funding agreements. By May 2010, the growing programme was targeted on underachieving secondary schools, with 203 such ‘sponsored academies’ already open and 60 more due that autumn.

Gove allowed successful schools to become academies and brought primaries into the programme. Many signed up for extra cash – typically £250,000 per secondary school – as they gained control of their local authority budgets. At a time of austerity, it was a no-brainer. In return, these ‘converter academies’ would work with weaker schools. Most say they do, though the extent to which they do so varies, and academy take-up has been much slower in primary schools.

Meanwhile, Gove also introduced ‘free schools’, essentially new academies set up in response to parental demand or innovative ideas from teachers, educational and faith-based charities. The government barred local authorities from establishing any traditional community schools.

Since 2010, the number of academies has grown rapidly. There are now over 4,000 academies, including nearly two-thirds of secondary and about one in eight primary schools, as well as dozens of technical academies – 30 university technical colleges and 37 studio schools with practical curriculums and close industry links for 14- to 19-year-olds.

Sponsored academies – of which there are now 1,100 – were intended to improve standards, particularly for the poorest students, which is why Gove required many failing primaries to change status, sometimes in the teeth of strong local opposition. Downhills primary school in Tottenham, north London – now the Harris Primary Academy Philip Lane – was a particular flashpoint and the scene of strong protests. The proportion of its pupils getting the expected level 4 in reading, writing and maths rose from 69% to 77% this summer – twice the national average improvement.

And, sponsored academies generally have improved faster than other schools, albeit from a lower base. Many belong to chains – groups led by an educational charity, a university or a successful school. Sutton Trust analysis in July found that disadvantaged pupils in nine of 31 chains studied had better results than the average for all schools, while improvements in 18 chains were faster than average. Some well-known chains, like Harris and Ark, each with 27 academies, do particularly well. But the study confirmed Department for Education concerns that other chains that had grown very rapidly since 2010 were underperforming.

The DfE capped 14 academy chains in March, including the 77-school Academies Enterprise Trust. They must focus on improving their existing schools before being allowed further expansion. Ministers also forced another academy chain, E-Act, to transfer 10 of its 34 schools to other sponsors. Ofsted chief inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw has inspected weaker academies in co-ordinated swoops across chains, including AET, where half the 12 academies inspected were deemed inadequate. He has yet to be given the power by ministers to inspect chains as separate entities.

This mixed picture also extends to the 250 free schools now open, though few have been open long enough for a full judgment. Seventy-nine free schools opened this term and 76 more have been approved, but the programme still feels incoherent. It may be the default mechanism for new schools with rising demand for new places, but relatively few free schools result from parental action.

Instead, there is an eclectic mix of genuine teacher innovation and rebranding of existing options, including faith schools, former independent schools or new academies established by chains.
One celebrated success has been the London Academy of Excellence, a free school for sixth formers in Stratford, east London, supported by Eton and the independent Brighton College, which sent four of its 160 students to Oxbridge and 68 to Russell Group universities this year. However, the local college says it does well too: of the 75 students it admitted with the 5A* or A grades at GCSE required by LAE, 60 went to Russell Group universities and two to Oxbridge.

Other free schools have faced real difficulties. The Montessori Discovery free school in Crawley, Sussex, had to close in January after a damning Ofsted report. Anal ysis by independent factchecking organisation Full Fact of Ofsted data suggests a similar proportion of free schools were rated outstanding as other schools, but a higher proportion rated inadequate or failing, based on 40 free school inspections.

For all the arguments about academies and free schools, their impact may be more prosaic than their supporters or critics allow. Good chains have an effective model absent in weaker chains. But their success still reflects quality of leadership and teaching, and their consistent application, which may not simply be an academy effect when many schools are forming collective trusts and federations.

This is why other reforms may matter more. There is growing interest in using research evidence to inform school improvement. Since 2011, the Education Endowment Foundation, a sister charity of the Sutton Trust established with £135m of government money to help improve results for disadvantaged pupils, has used 75 randomised trials to test approaches to school improvement. Nearly half of school leaders now consult its research evidence.

Tougher accountability is making its mark too. Ofsted has put many coasting schools into special measures and placed more emphasis on good teaching, downgrading some previously top-rated schools. Gove toughened Labour’s floor targets, requiring weaker schools to achieve ever-rising minimum standards. Failure often prompts a requirement to become an academy.

However, the biggest upheaval has been to the curriculum and exams. This term, primary pupils face tougher spelling, grammar, punctuation and mental arithmetic lessons, in addition to phonics checks introduced in 2012, while secondary schools are introducing computer science, harder maths and more historical chronology. GCSE coursework, modularity and resits have been dropped, leading to a dip in English performance this year. Many vocational qualifications have been devalued or removed from the league tables.

From 2016, secondary schools will be judged on their best eight GCSE subjects, using average points, rather than the five best graded C or above as now. This builds on the English Baccalaureate, a league table measure of English, maths, science, languages and humanities results. The combined impact is intended to make exams harder and ensure that schools don’t game the league tables to conceal underlying weaknesses. However, they also make it much harder to make a fair judgment on the success of Gove’s reforms, and could force down results at once struggling schools and academies that were starting to improve.

Yet behind the flurry of change, there remains an underlying truth. The two things that make the most difference to a school’s success, particularly for poorer pupils, are the quality of its teaching and the calibre of its leaders.

Gove has introduced teaching schools, with a remit to improve teaching quality among groups of local schools, and expanded school-based teacher training. But for all the emphasis on new teachers – 35,000 are recruited each year, and their quality has been improving alongside that of school leaders – there is far too little done to improve the skills of the 450,000 serving teachers in England’s classrooms. In fact, there is much more variation in the quality of teaching within schools than there is between schools.

Improved professional development and teacher appraisal may not set reformers’ pulses racing, but they could make most difference at the chalkface. Sutton Trust research has shown that raising the quality of the weakest tenth of teachers to the average would lift England from a middling position in the OECD international league tables to the top five, and the trust is now working with the Gates Foundation to capture international best practice. That could deliver the revolution in standards that politicians want to see – in academies and community schools alike.

Thursday, 11 September 2014

My latest Sutton Trust blog highlights the importance of social mobility in the 2015 party manifestos.

Justine Greening, the development secretary, remembered her days working at Morrison’s, and warned that her party needed to do more to improve social mobility, in last week’s Spectator. Frances O’Grady, the TUC general secretary, spoke this week of a ‘Downton Abbey-style society’ that ‘bears down on working class people’s voice and aspirations.’ The new children’s minister Sam Gyimah recalled a period of undergraduate penury while at Oxford in an interview in the Independent .

And, as Lee Elliot Major noted in his recent blog, Alan Milburn’s latest report catalogued once again the extent to which our elites are dominated by those who are privately and Oxbridge-educated, drawing heavily on Trust research.

All these public figures know what they are talking about. They have gone from modest beginnings to become senior figures in British public life. Their pronouncements have the greater credibility because of that life experience. But the overall message is the same: we’re not doing nearly enough in Britain to improve social mobility.

That’s why today’s Mobility Manifesto matters so much. The problem is illustrated starkly by two statistics that highlight the entrenched nature of these inequalities. At age five, there is already a 19 month gap in school readiness between the richest and poorest children. A young person from the richest fifth of neighbourhoods is ten times more likely to go to a Russell Group university than a child from the poorest fifth.

As the manifesto points out, these disparities continue into adulthood and, despite good higher education access, as the OECD’s Andreas Schleicher pointed out this week, too much of how well you do in later life is still determined by your parents' income.

The manifesto offers ideas across the educational spectrum, from early years through to better apprenticeships and fairer university access. Some proposals many not make any party pledge card, such as improved career guidance, but are no less important for that, and should feature in every party’s overall education policy. Some ideas go with the grain of political consensus – sharpening the pupil premium, backed by more evidence-based policy or a professional development guarantee for teachers. Others like an enrichment voucher for less advantaged parents extend its logic.

Others are clearly more controversial, such as our Open Access proposals to open up the 100 leading independent day schools, yet those who criticise the idea don’t offer any serious alternatives or the idea that comprehensive schools should have fairer admissions.

For the manifesto, we asked YouGov to test public reaction to one perennial issue on which political hand-wringing is often most pronounced: school admissions. Most schools use distance from the school as the main criterion for admissions to their school. They have to prioritise children in care, and often prioritise brothers and sisters of existing pupils too. But in ‘comprehensive schools’, distance rules.

Last year, we showed again the consequences of this approach. The 500 comprehensives – maintained schools and academies – with the best GCSE results took half as many disadvantaged pupils as the national average. Only one in ten of the top 500 bucked that trend. A few weeks ago, Lloyds Bank calculated that the average premium in house prices in the catchment area of top schools is £22,000, and it is often much more.

Of course, in rural areas and market towns, a neighbourhood admissions policy is probably the only practical solution. But that’s not true in the cities. We showed earlier this year that a small but growing number of academies is using random allocation (ballots) or ability banding (across the range of abilities) to achieve a fairer intake. These tend to be oversubscribed schools where a catchment area is a moveable measure and increasingly arbitrary as a result.

We’ve said that we want to see ballots for school admissions for some time, but what do parents think? Given the scenario of a popular comprehensive academy with 100 places and 400 applicants, the poll of 1169 parents across Britain (obtained from an overall general sample of British respondents) showed that 28% of parents thought all the places should be allocated by a ballot or randomly, 41% thought places should go to those living nearest the academy and 19% thought that half the places should be allocated by ballot and half by distance. In total 47% believed that ballots should play a part in the oversubscribed school’s admissions. Equally, by a margin of 41% to 29%, parents believed that that all children should have the opportunity to go to private school, regardless of family income, at the Government or taxpayer’s expense.

What this suggests is that when presented with a realistic scenario – and the best urban comprehensives are heavily oversubscribed – the public recognises that things might need to be done differently to be fairer. We’re hoping the political parties are open about the challenges, and that they will be brave and ambitious in their plans to tackle social mobility for the 2015 general election.

We’ll be taking this message to the three main party conferences over the next month, where leading figures from each party will debate different proposals from our manifesto. Whatever the result of next Thursday’s Scottish referendum, the problem of poor social mobility will still be with us. That’s why our manifesto ideas should have prominence in their manifestos for 2015.

Publications

Excellence in Education (2005)

About Me

Dublin-born in 1963, since September 2012 I have been Director of Research and Communications for the Sutton Trust. I was previously senior adviser to David Blunkett from 1993-2001 and Tony Blair's senior education adviser from 2005-7. I have also been an independent writer and consultant. I am the author (with Cyril Taylor) of Excellence in Education (David Fulton, 2004)and Freedom from Failure (CPS, 2002); and editor of Bac or Basics (SMF, 2004) and Staying the Course (SMF, 2008), co-editor with Julian Astle of a book on Academies (Centreforum, 2008) and author of Lessons for Life (HTI, 2011). I have also written many articles for the Guardian, Independent, Daily Mail, Evening Standard, Times, Sunday Times, TES, Irish Times, Public Finance, New Statesman and Tribune, among other publications, and contributed to many national and local radio and TV news programmes in the UK and Ireland. I am a director at a multi-academy trust and a trustee of the National Foundation for Educational Research.
All views expressed on this blog are my own and appear in a personal capacity.